The 70s, BBC Two, preview

It’s time to re-evaluate the Seventies, says Dominic Sandbrook, ahead of his
new TV series on the decade.

Birth of a nation: flares and bad hair aside, the Seventies saw the rise of individual self-expression, as immortalised in ‘The Good Life’ Photo: BBC

By Dominic Sandbrook

11:30AM BST 16 Apr 2012

No decade in recent memory has had a worse press than the Seventies. In our collective memory, these were the years of strikes and blackouts, financial crises and terrorist atrocities, terrible wallpaper and undrinkable wine. Compared with the Technicolor Sixties and the lurid Eighties, the decade in between often seems damp, drab and distant.

We wince at the sight of Alf Garnett and Bernard Manning; we shudder to recall the oil crisis and the three-day week; we recoil at the very thought of Harold Wilson’s pipe. When, in Life on Mars, John Simm’s detective woke up in 1973, we shared his pain.

The irony, though, is that the way we remember the Seventies could hardly be more wrong. Just as the supposedly swinging Sixties were much duller and more conservative than we think, the years that followed were much more exciting.

For ordinary families, the Seventies was the decade when everything changed. In 1970, people might have read about the sexual revolution in their daily papers; but most had never experienced it. Most still had black and white televisions, went on holiday to Blackpool and thought that having orange juice as a starter was the height of sophistication.

As I hope to show in my new BBC Two series, adapted from my two books on the era, in the next 10 years their lives were to change in ways they could barely have imagined.

Of course it is true that, in many ways, these were desperately bleak years. Inflation hit 26 per cent, the miners twice walked out on strike, and almost every week saw another horrific IRA atrocity. When Ted Heath fell from office in 1974, the impotence of the British state in the face of trade union militancy seemed to have been laid bare. Heath’s great rival, Harold Wilson, was a shadow of his former self, his once fine mind dulled by brandy, exhaustion and the first signs of dementia.

And even though Labour’s Jim Callaghan, who ran the country from 1976 to 1979, was a more effective prime minister than we remember, he too proved powerless in the face of the unions. It was no wonder that during the Winter of Discontent, as nurses and rubbish collectors walked out, many people concluded that Britain was finished.

And yet there was more to life than strikes and inflation – which is, of course, why so many younger people have relatively fond memories of the Bagpuss years. What the toys and television shows remind us, after all, is that most British children were growing up amid affluence their parents could barely have imagined.

And behind the apocalyptic headlines, what really characterised life in the surprisingly sexy Seventies was the search for new experiences and the desire, quite simply, for more. Unwilling to be imprisoned by their class background, young people were eager to travel abroad and to enjoy pleasures previously confined to the rich and famous. Millions of working-class families, for example, began going on holiday to Malta and Majorca. They bought neat suburban homes in places such as Peterborough, one of the decade’s great boom towns. And, rushing to get their first colour televisions in readiness for Princess Anne’s wedding in 1973, many took out Access and Visa cards, pioneering a love affair with credit that is still with us today.

This was a decade in which everything – from Britain’s European future and the survival of our economy to our children’s education and even the traditional roles of men and women – seemed to be up for grabs. While Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith flew the flag for strong, articulate women on television, Margaret Thatcher was transforming the Conservative Party and preparing her march on 10 Downing Street.

And while David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Peter Wyngarde’s Jason King and Roger Moore’s James Bond were pushing the boundaries of male fashion, even ordinary working-class men were experimenting with shaggy hair, droopy moustaches and explosively colourful ties.

The old barriers, it seemed, were falling away. “If I’ve been at all responsible for people finding more characters within themselves than they originally thought they’d had, then I’m pleased,” Bowie remarked, “because that’s something I feel very strongly about. That one isn’t totally what one has been conditioned to think one is.”

In a way, these words sum up the spirit of the Seventies. Indeed, even the single most potent image of the entire decade – Margaret Thatcher walking into Downing Street in May 1979 as our first woman prime minister – was testament to the same spirit of self-reinvention. Mrs Thatcher, after all, had been born into a society in which a woman’s place was firmly in the home. Now, pledging to reverse the nation’s fortunes after years of relative decline, she had reached the supreme office.

Yet far from being the architect of our transformation, she was, in fact, its beneficiary. She won because, more than any other politician of the day, she realised how much Britain had already been transformed by affluence and individualism. The truth is that from glam rock and gay rights to ready meals and Rising Damp, from cheap mortgages to Clive Sinclair’s pioneering pocket calculators, the Seventies was the decade in which today’s Britain – ambitious, anxious, multicultural and materialistic – was born.

'The 70s' begins on Monday 16 April on BBC Two at 9.00pm. Dominic Sandbrook’s new book on the Seventies, Seasons in the Sun, is published by Allen Lane on Wednesday